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Updated: May 14, 2025
The use here of the word "cognitions" calls our attention to the fact that, when men say, "this is right, that is wrong," they mean no more than, "this I like, that I do not like"; and the use of the word "apparent" indicates that the judgments expressed may be approved by the man who makes them, and yet be erroneous. The appeal is to an objective standard; there is a demand for proof.
Rational cognitions which are objective, that is, which have their source in reason, can be so termed from a subjective point of view, only when they have been drawn by the individual himself from the sources of reason, that is, from principles; and it is in this way alone that criticism, or even the rejection of what has been already learned, can spring up in the mind.
It is something external, an accumulation of cognitions as one might store material commodities in a warehouse. Truth exists ready-made somewhere. Study is then the process by which an individual draws on what is in storage. On the other hand, learning means something which the individual does when he studies. It is an active, personally conducted affair.
He simply puts forward occult science; and in what it has to say about various matters, he shows how his knowledge is related to other departments of life and science, what antagonism it may encounter, and in what way reality stands witness to the truth of his cognitions.
For, as a doctrine, that is, as an endeavour to enlarge the sphere of the understanding in regard to pure a priori cognitions, philosophy is worse than useless, since from all the attempts hitherto made, little or no ground has been gained.
This, I need hardly say, is the association philosophy. It proceeds by analyzing certain cognitions and sentiments into their elements, and straightway declaring that they mean nothing more than these. That is to say, the associationist passes from genesis to validity, from the history of a conscious state to its objective meaning.
For speculative cognition cannot find an objective basis any other where than in experience; and, when we overstep its limits our synthesis, which requires ever new cognitions independent of experience, has no substratum of intuition upon which to build.
It is a peculiarity, which distinguishes the proofs of transcendental synthetical propositions from those of all other a priori synthetical cognitions, that reason, in the case of the former, does not apply its conceptions directly to an object, but is first obliged to prove, a priori, the objective validity of these conceptions and the possibility of their syntheses.
Truth is that which, being deemed conceivable, and being really perceived, has also the quality of finding its place, its relation, and its confirmation in the whole mass of cognitions previously acquired.
But the transcendental efforts of pure reason are all made in the sphere of the subjective, which is the real medium of all dialectical illusion; and thus reason endeavours, in its premisses, to impose upon us subjective representations for objective cognitions.
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